From ambiguity to contestation: discourse(s) of non-traditional security in the ASEAN community

‘Non-traditional security’ (NTS) is prominently featured in the agenda of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other ASEAN-led institutions in the Asia-Pacific. ‘NTS’ brings together a series transnational and non-military security threats that are considered common among regional states, urgent for them to attend to, and non-sensitive all at the same time. This a priori makes it a self-evident focus of attempts to bring regional security cooperation ‘to a higher plane’. However, this paper reveals that the uncontroversial character of NTS is overestimated, by shedding light on the co-existence of divergent – and potentially contradictory – interpretations of its meaning and implications in ASEAN and the wider region. In a context where ASEAN's relevance to the pursuit of regional security is increasingly being measured against its (in)ability to provide a coherent approach to security challenges that affect the region, the contested nature of NTS has important implications for the grouping's resilience in the twenty-first century.     

Videogame analysis: a social-semiotic approach

The relevance of videogames in the contemporary cultural ecosystem and their social impact make it necessary to develop theories and analytical models to understand the expressive potential of videogame design, and how videogames work as texts, giving shape to certain values, behavioural patterns and ideological visions. To do so, it is crucial to build a bridge between game studies and contemporary semiotics. Thus, with this aim, we present in this paper an analysis model for studying videogames as texts that combines theoretical and methodological elements from social semiotics and procedural rhetorics, a specific branch of game studies. Our model is based on four levels: the narrative, ludo-narrative, system-gameplay and designer-player dimensions. As a case study, the model is applied to the videogame The Last of Us.     

Missing in action: practice,paralegality, and the nature of immigration enforcement

U.S. immigration control is typically understood in terms of enforcement practices undertaken by federal officers guided by legislation and court decisions. While legislation and court opinions are important components of the immigration control apparatus, they do not adequately account for immigration control ‘on the ground.’ To explore this problem, we advance the concept of paralegality, the practices and operations that constitute a dynamic system of actions and relationships that are not simply linear applications of legislation or judicial decisions but may in fact extend or counter these texts. We illustrate the importance of paralegality by reconstructing the evolution of the §287(g) and Secure Communities programs, both of which have shape-shifted dramatically since their inception. Our account of immigration control highlights the problem practice poses for law, proposes a theoretical alternative to textual-law-centric research on immigration and law enforcement, and contributes to scholarship on everyday citizenship.     

Advancing the study of political cleavages through experimentation: Revisiting regionalism and redistributive preferences in Canada

The maintenance of welfare state policies requires citizen support for the provision of a social safety net through taxation and redistribution. Research has shown that a diverse political polity presents a risk to the welfare state; however, Canada bucks the trend and does not see citizen support for economic redistribution decline in response to immigration-based population diversity. Using Canada as our case, we argue that scholars of welfare state politics and redistribution should turn their attention to other sources of population heterogeneity in an effort to better understand how different political cleavages affect citizens’ redistributive preferences. We use an online experimental survey to manipulate the in-group identity of 500 Canadians. The survey enables respondents to identify with other in-group identities along regional, linguistic, income-group, and urban/rural characteristics. Our results find that while Canadians do have a strong baseline preference for redistributive behaviour, regional and linguistic cleavages moderate this outcome.     

A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

Making votes count in parliament or government?

Several scholars have sought to elucidate voting strategies in proportional representation (PR) systems. The argument is that the existence of coalition governments forces voters to consider potential alliances and to vote in order to maximize their chances of influencing the outcome. In this paper, we argue that this vision is incomplete as PR, just as single-member district plurality, also creates incentives for voters to desert parties that have little chances of obtaining a seat in their district. We validate this theoretical claim using two different surveys conducted during the 2014 Belgian federal and regional elections. Our results show that both government and district viability have a substantial and distinct effect on vote choice.     

Competition and switching in public service markets: Can they reduce inequalities?

Regulatory reforms to public infrastructure services across European Union (EU) countries were aimed at increasing consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into service markets. However, empirical evaluations have questioned whether these reforms have benefitted all consumers, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users (especially those with lower levels of formal education), might be locked into poorly performing services. We assess the relationship between the level of competition in electricity and fixed telephony markets in EU countries and evaluate the affordability of these services for different socio‐educational layers. Our findings show that – although in countries where there is a relatively high frequency of switching, inequalities between socio‐educational groups are smaller and eventually disappear – competition as such does not play a part. These results suggest that demand‐side regulation that successfully enables consumer switching has the potential to equalize social welfare, thereby reflecting a possible convergence of regulatory instruments and the central aims of the welfare state in this context.     

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fascism may be identified by its actions, the stages through which a fascist rule takes power, and how to recognize it before it does so. The thesis is that a fascist takeover of a democratic government is rapid and unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the name of the people, while it accomplishes the opposite: a single-party corporate regime that replaces individual liberty with subtle, bureaucratic, and overt types of coercion. Rather than generate a generic definition of the many types of fascism, it is more useful to study how it affects the lives of ordinary people, the milieu out of which it develops, and what its precursors look like. Understanding fascism entails studying it from the point of view of those who lived under it and recorded their experiences, as well as from the analytic perspectives of social scientists. As Robert O. Paxton observes: “The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected.”¹Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” in Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, edited by Roger Griffin, vol. I (2004), Chapter 14, 305–26.View all notes We are facing the question again in 2017 with the surprise election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States by a minority of the popular vote and the evident support of the white nationalist milieu. Paxton proposes a five-stage theory for understanding fascism in its many varieties. A developmental sequence is proposed against which current events in the United States may be assessed.     

历史主义的解释学问题

在19世纪,除了浪漫主义的解释学外,还有历史主义的解释学。它们之间的一个重要的联结点是解释学循环。除此之外,二者的密切关系在其师承和道统方面。布克、德罗伊森和狄尔泰三人的思想代表了西方19世纪下半叶解释学的一个重要的特点,那就是突出与人文科学的联系,这是以历史意识的逐步确立为中介的,但是他们,尤其是德罗伊森和狄尔泰最终都没能摆脱历史的局限。